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grandhotelabyss · 2 years

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Context: a discussion over at the SubStack of my recent interlocutor Default Friend about the is-it-or-isn’t-it? semi-renascent reactionary arts scene. Above is a quote from the essay DF is responding to. According to the editor of the journal that published the essay, we would all take it more seriously if we knew the pseudonymous author’s real name—apparently a name we’d be familiar with.

I’m getting sick of these sudden intimations everywhere about how behind the scenes all the great ones have gone right-wing now, and it would curl your hair if you only knew who they were... If I, a semi-employed adjunct professor, can publish (admittedly liberal) critiques of compulsory pronoun sharing and land acknowledgements under my own name, then perhaps people whose names are better known (and bank accounts fuller) than mine can somehow seize their courage and say what they mean.

Anyway, Default asks if dissidents want a “right-wing” or an “anti-woke” arts scene to succeed contemporary hegemonic left-liberalism. Here I would like to recall what has historically been the position of Grand Hotel Abyss going back to the dawn of contemporary social justice in 2012, that what we need is apolitical art. Not apolitical in the sense of having no political implications—anything can have political implications—but because it has no predetermined message or motive, no compulsory drive toward moral didacticism or coherence-in-service-of-the-public-good or, God help us, a policy outcome.

But if the quote above from our pseudonymous reactionary—code name: Aeneas Tacitus Minor (sunt lacrimae rerum!)—is anything to go by, the new reactionary art will be be as moralistic and philistine as what it proposes to replace. You want non-progressive art? Find me a less progressive 20th-century major play than A Streetcar Named Desire. What is the social virtue of this play? What is the political message? Where is the positive LGBTQIA+ representation? Instead, it makes Othello look like Arthur Miller. You see in my lectures (here they are for our audiovisual Monday: part one, part two) how I soften it for the kids, but the meaning of the drama is the illicit pleasure in watching a fatal collision of masculine modern democracy with feminine archaic aristocracy, in watching Williams battle it out with himself, the sadomasochistic pleasure he takes in imagining his wailing, poetic anima raped, his ambitious animus doing the job, all on the rancid mattress of the postwar South. He is Blanche and Stanley, the violator and the violated. Is Williams both woman-obsessed and secretly misogynistic? Yes—a frequent phenomenon with male writers, whether straight, gay, or in-between—but these are neutral descriptions of the drama’s inner wellspring; their censorious use as moralistic terms of reproach, whether wielded by the neoreactionary or the social justice warrior, is irrelevant to the art.

Streetcar is apolitical art. He wrote freely and with a discipline of his own against the mind police who show up at the drama’s end, the ones who lobotomized his sister. Art back then could be more of a refuge from such enforcers. You could write that way when you weren’t expected to project public-health slogans on the proscenium; you could express and even resolve your complicated psychosexual tensions (we all have them) in huge public image-metaphor complexes—back before today’s enforcers, who have invaded art itself, the “mental health” awareness advocates and the academo-bureaucrats of theory and the cultish vigilante youth cadres they recruited online, who locked us all inside pronoun prisons and fake diagnostic labels and demanded adamantine identities and positive representations, rather than the high art of tragedy: beautiful Apollonian tableaux of terrifying Dionysian flux, whether we like it or not.

But if reactionaries who claim to want to liberate us from such hegemonic left-liberal stultifications are just going to fling words like “hysteric” and “neurotic” around, then as far as I’m concerned it’s another and sadly typical case of meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

#art #aesthetics #conservatism #the new conservatism #neoreaction #literary criticism #drama #tennessee williams

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arcticdementor · 4 years

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Woke anti-racism certainly appears to have taken on the trappings of religion. White people have been seen washing the feet of black people and asking for forgiveness, a ritual firmly in line with the Christian tradition. And terms like ‘white guilt’ and ‘white privilege’ are treated much as Original Sin used to be – things for which humanity must forever atone.

One person who has long been exploring the religious fervour of today’s increasingly moralistic politics is the essayist and author Joseph Bottum. Indeed, his 2014 book, An Anxious Age: The Post-Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of America, seems almost prophetic. There he argued that the demise of traditional Protestantism in the US has led liberals to transfer their religious beliefs, habits and passions into the political realm, moralising it in the process. Our age of ‘post-Protestantism’, he concludes, has eroded the boundary between the religious and the political, infusing politics with a religious mindset and discourse.

spiked’s US correspondent, Sean Collins, caught up with Bottum, at his home in the Black Hills of South Dakota, to find out what he makes of the contemporary political moment, woke anti-racism and the phenomenon of cancel culture.

Sean Collins: As you note in An Anxious Age, the collapse of Mainline Protestantism (that is, the older, non-evangelical Protestant denominations) in the US is striking. In 1965, more than 50 per cent of Americans belonged to Protestant congregations. Now it is less than 10 per cent. Why, in your view, is this collapse so significant for broader American society and politics?

Joseph Bottum: In Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville identified the central current of America as a current of morals and manners. However much rival sects feuded against one another, there was this central current. And it is the Mainline Protestant churches which provided America with those morals and manners. (‘Mainline’ is a term that was created later, but we can apply it retrospectively.)

The Mainline churches helped define American culture in several ways. First of all, the churches were mostly apolitical, which has had a profound effect on American culture. For instance, there’s never been a great American political novel. The average French streetwalker in a novel by Zola knows more about politics than the heroes of the greatest American novels. What is it to be an American? At the highest artistic level, it is to be concerned about the cosmos and the self. Politics is incidental to Moby Dick, The Scarlet Letter and Huckleberry Finn. And that’s because Mainline Protestantism rendered politics secondary to what it deems is most important — namely, salvation and the self.

…

Collins: Right, so we now live in, as you put it, a post-Protestant US. But, if I understand your thesis correctly, you argue that the beliefs, mindsets and manners that animated earlier Protestantism have not been abandoned, but instead have been projected on to the political realm. A key transition you cite is the Social Gospel movement, which becomes more prominent during the 20th century. Then closer to our time Christianity gets stripped out altogether, and you are just left with social activism. Sin remains a preoccupation, but it has been redefined as a social sin, like bigotry and racism. Have I got that right?

Bottum: Yes. There’s an extraordinary point here. Walter Rauschenbusch [an American theologian and a key figure in the Social Gospel movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries] lists six species of social sin. If you go through the list, they are exactly what radicals are objecting to now: bigotry, the ignorance of the uneducated, power, corruption, militarism and oppression. It lines up so perfectly with today’s agitation.

What we’re seeing now is an amplification of what I wrote about five years ago: an intense spiritual hunger that has no outlet. There’s no way to see people kneeling, or singing ‘Hands up, don’t shoot’, or swaying while they hold up candles, and avoid acknowledging that it’s driven by a spiritual desire. I perceived this when I wrote about Occupy Wall Street, and it’s become even more like this. It is an intense spiritual hunger that is manifesting itself more violently. Because to the post-Protestants, the world is an outrage and we are all sinners.

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Similarly, there is ostracising and shunning. Cancel culture is just the latest and most virulent form of the religious notion of shunning, in which people are chased into further appreciation of their guiltiness. Two years ago, the Nation published a poem about an older panhandler giving advice to a younger one, about how to get people to give you money. The Twittermob went after that poem, on the grounds that the poet was a white man from Minnesota. And the magazine apologised, and the poet apologised for writing the poem. That’s what the shunning is looking for. If you profane, if you’re shunned outside the Temple, the only way back is to become fanatic, to convince people that you understand how guilty you are. And even then I’m not sure there’s any way back.

At the very least, one of the effects of the shunning is to frighten everyone into silence. Its purpose is to get people fired, to put people beyond the pale, to get them out of our sight. This is for a couple reasons. First, it is to ensure we are not infected by this sinfulness. And second, it is a public declaration of our power. It says, look how powerful we are, that we can do this to people.

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We live in just the strangest times. But understanding the historical roots of these radicals as post-Protestant, and understanding the spiritual hunger which has no outlet for them, helps us to explain it. This is what happens when you have a Mainline outlook that is broken loose from all of its prior constraints. These ideas used to be corralled in the churches. If you let an idea like Original Sin – that’s a dangerous and powerful idea – loose from its corral, it goes to a place where it can exist, which is politics. One of the great dangers is that religious ideas are in politics. The line that I use is that, if you believe that your ordinary political opponents are not merely mistaken, but are evil, you have ceased to do politics and begun to do religion.

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Suppose you analyse this class in terms of its members’ answer to the question, ‘How do you know that you are saved?’. In the past, people would say ‘because I believe in Christ’ and the rest of it. But the modern version of this question is, ‘How do you know you are a good person? And how can you have assurance of your goodness?’. Which is Max Weber’s question in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism – and Weber says this anxiety about salvation actually has economic and political consequences. Let’s apply that Weberian analysis and ask what are the consequences of being worried about your salvation, phrased in today’s terms of being worried about being a good person. If it’s all about social ills, then you know you are a good person if you are opposed to those social ills, if you are anti-racist, even if you don’t do anything. You are convinced of your own salvation. You are one of the Elect if you adopt this stance of being opposed to the great sins.

Now, younger people are not going to put up with the hypocrisy of knowing you are a good person but not actually doing anything. And they are starting to be violent. Members of the Elect are much more economically and socially insecure than the elite, but they have the same education, they’ve got the same social markers. In some ways, we are seeing an intra-class warfare between the Elect and the elite.

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Collins: Yes, today’s leaders in cultural institutions and universities seem to lack backbone. They have espoused this politically correct rhetoric for years, but it’s like they didn’t truly believe it or act on it, and now the younger generation are calling them on it.

Bottum: Right, the younger generation are not going to put up with the hypocrisy. That’s part of it. The second part is, when they see the old power figures tremble, they start thinking, why aren’t we in the positions of power? Then class elements, elitism, start to creep back in. But the original impulse came from seeing leaders like college presidents being hypocrites. They were just mouthing what they thought was just the latest line of the old liberal consensus. What they didn’t fully intuit is that the old liberal consensus was completely gone, and the new line had become something very radical. If today you were to put forward any of the shibboleths of high liberalism of the 1950s, you would be denounced as a terrible conservative.

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Collins: I’ve also noticed a tendency to avoid detailed analysis of economic and social conditions, or concrete policy reforms. Instead, the issue of race after George Floyd is a simple moral denunciation, or a vague reference to ‘systemic racism’. You hear ‘Why do I have to keep explaining this?’, ‘I’m so exhausted’, and so on, as if the issue was beyond debate.

Bottum: Right. But also it’s defining the Church. It’s a way of saying you either have this feeling or you don’t. And if you don’t, you’re evil, and if you do, you’re good. Christian theology, and Christian spiritual practice, has dealt with this for millennia. This is the distinction Calvin would make between justification and sanctification. The idea here is that we no longer need to argue it, because any argument of it is engaging with people beyond the pale. They are outside the Church, they are the profane. They are just wrong. What are they wrong about? They are wrong in the central feeling of moral goodness. This is the attempt to get others to shut up.

We are living in the age of the ad hominem. The fundamental way to answer a claim is to say something about the person who said it. Whether it’s a tu quoque, or an abusive ad hominem, or poisoning the well – the ad hominem is a whole genus of different species of fallacy. How do we know others are wrong? They are wrong because some bad people have said it too. Bari Weiss [the former New York Times op-ed editor] must be wrong [about the illiberal environment at the Times], because Ted Cruz forwarded her tweet. That’s a wonderful ad hominem – guilt by association. It’s not about the content of what is said, it’s about the people who said it.

Why should Trader Joe’s give in, and say how stupid and guilty it was for not realising the error of its ways? Because otherwise its managers and staff are not good people. It doesn’t matter if there is any objective truth to it. The only thing that matters is where you stand. Are you one of us, or are you one of them?

If I can show that you are one of them, then your only response is to apologise abjectly, even though you didn’t know. You didn’t know that touching your middle finger to your thumb is making a white power symbol. It doesn’t matter whether you knew that. A Hispanic driver for a power company in California got fired because his hand was hanging out the window, with his finger touching his thumb. A women photographed it and declared it was the white power symbol, and the power company fired him. It’s really astonishing.

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It’s not enough to be one of the good guys, to be on the right side. You have to be bulletproof against any charge. You have to be constantly abject. You have to agree with your condemners, or you’re evil. The [French philosopher] Merleau-Ponty wrote about this in terms of the Moscow showtrials – about the psychological process by which people can come to confess their own guilt about something that, at some level, they know they are not guilty of. So the psychological aspect is interesting. But this mode of permanent abject contrition is best understood in its religious modes. This is what you get when the Church of Christ becomes the Church without Christ, and these old Protestant concerns enter the public square, enter politics, divorced from and freed from their old constraints. To paraphrase GK Chesterton, the world is full of Christian ideas gone mad.

Collins: Why does the Elect have to go as far as to ‘cancel’? You could imagine a movement promulgating certain moral ideas in society, and hoping to win converts. Such a movement wouldn’t necessarily feel the need to purge others, who didn’t agree with them, from their workplaces and colleges. What drives the Elect to go to those lengths?

Bottum: Look, you wouldn’t want a Satan worshipper turning up at your Church on a Sunday. You would drive them out. But of course these people don’t live in churches any more. This is what happens when those old ideas break loose and become modes of behaviour in politics. They don’t want these people in their church, but their church is politics. Their congregation is Twitter. They want these people not to exist, they want them banished. There are the power reasons for this: look at how powerful I am; I am a 17-year-old kid, and I had a major US corporation kow-towing to me. But there’s also this kind of religious sense that we can’t let sinners into the church. That’s what shunning was for, to get people to confess their sins, to realise their sinfulness. That’s what we’re doing now – it’s just that the church, the locus of faith, is no longer your congregation on Sunday. It’s public life.

This demand that politics somehow solve everything is an apocalyptic, religious sense of politics. For hundreds of years American jurisprudence has worried about the impact of religion on politics. What’s really extraordinary is that it is finally happening – politics is becoming religionised – but it’s being done in the name of anti-religion.

#sean collins #spiked online #interview #joseph bottum #puritan hypothesis #puritans gonna puritan #great awokening #read the whole thing

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lj-writes · 7 years

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And this is not discourse?

I had a conversation with a reylo shipper who claimed the finnrey tag had so much discourse and self-righteousness that people leave. While that’s kind of rich coming from someone who was complaining about having their ship policed, I nevertheless looked in the tag (sorted by popularity) and it looks... exactly like a normal shipping tag?

Let’s see: Someone rooting for Jedi Finn, a fan comic of Finn and Rey’s reuinion echoing Han and Leia’s, someone joking about how we all lost it over a fucking box, a really sweet minific/meta/headcanon about Finn’s and Rey’s names, anticipation of Luke, Rey, and Finn kicking Kylo Ren’s ass (yeah!), screencap of Rey eyeing Finn, fanart, fan video, edits, soulmate AU... where’s all this DISCOURSE I’ve been hearing so much about? I’m going to need you to step it up on the self-righteousness, people, because we are never going to prove our moral superiority at this rate.

[Image: Screencap of top finnrey search results]

I mean, the only parts that could be faintly discourse-y are the Jedi Finn bits, since it ties into the special prestige that Jedi characters have in this franchise and how it relates to POC representation in the fandom. Whatever the background, it’s an idea a lot of fans like. So unless having this particular fantasy somehow makes you a pretentious asshole I think we’re in the clear.

So either my interlocutor hadn’t been in the finnrey tags in a while, or the things that other fans do (fanart, jokes, headcanons, screencaps) is self-aggrandazing condescension when finnrey shippers do it. I am going to be charitable and the former, since I’m fairly new to the fandom and don’t know what the tag was like in the beginning.

TW reylo imagery and discussion below the cut

For comparison’s sake I did the same search for reylo as I did for finnrey and again, it’s similar stuff, fanart, fanfic, encouragements to shippers and so on.

[Image: Screencap of top reylo search results]

I’d like to comment on two of the top results (visible at the left and middle of the screencap). Here’s a closer look at the post that shows up on the left, with Rey’s image from the empty toy box we all losts our minds over:

[Image description: Image of Rey holding a lightsaber (clicking and scrolling right will show an image of Kylo Ren with his lightsaber), and below a quote “I would burn down the whole galaxy if I thought it was right.”

Like mother like son, he can’t deny the truth that is his family. I have a feeling a good part of The Last Jedi will be Kylo scouring the galaxy for Rey, destroying everything in his path until he can get to her.

I can’t wait for Episode VIII!]

See, this kind of thing is exactly why I have to take a moment to steady myself before and after going into the reylo tag, and why I limit my exposure to research purposes. There’s the application of Leia’s quote to Kylo Ren’s war-criminal ways, but okay. She did say that.

But then going on to talk giddily about how Kylo Ren will stalk a woman who hates him and wants nothing to do with him, “destroying everything in his path” and how they “can’t wait” to see that?

We’ve seen Kylo destroy everything in his path before. You know, when he ordered the deaths of civilian prisoners. When he didn’t lift a finger to stop the murder of billions. When he seriously injured Finn for getting between him and an unconscious Rey, taking joy in the agony he inflicted on Finn. This, in Reyloland, is the stuff of romance.

There’s also the image that shows up in the center of the screencap of search results, showing Kylo Ren standing behind Rey with his hands on her shoulders. Rey is dressed in black, and reading the post reveals that this is fan art for a fanfic where Rey is now allied with the Knights of Ren.

I don’t know about you, but to me it is not politically neutral to romanticize stalking someone and killing her friends. Using an antifascist heroine joining the Space Nazi enforcers as a setup for romance is not politically neutral, either. This content, right up there in the top of the search results for reylo, is not harmlessly apolitical, certainly not to anyone who lives with the realities of abuse and fascism.

Much as reylos like to draw a distinction between apolitical reylo shippers as opposed to overly political and moralistic finnrey fans, the thing is that reylo is just as political as finnrey if not more so. The difference is that the politics of reylo follow the status quo and so can take on the appearance of being apolitical as established ideologies do.

#finnrey #meta #anti reylo #fandom #shipping #star wars #no i'm not disguising the word reylo #because the reylo i was talking to kindly suggested i should change my search habits rather than they disguise the word finnrey #when i've seen antis go into contortions disguising the word reylo and i've done the same myself #so what's good for the goose is good for the gander right?

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arcticdementor · 5 years

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Sohrab Ahmari, who previously wrote a decent takedown of the exemplar of nominative determinism Max Boot, but who I’ve otherwise never heard of before, wrote an article in First Things opposing “David Frenchism,” a “persuasion or a sensibility” that he names after the National Review writer who Bill Kristol named as the ideal #NeverTrump candidate for president.

The “Frenchist” disposition, according to Ahmari, is a nice, liberal one. It sees politics as a matter of procedure, institutions, and ‘decency’; it seeks to defend the conservative cause by appeal to the liberal logic of autonomy, and it inherits from its English nonconformist roots a “great horror … of the public power to advance the common good,” leading it to insist that political challenges be solved by the depoliticized measures of “personal renewal” and somehow-organic cultural change.

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But the apparent endorsement of far-left political violence by American Interest writers is a manifestation of a broader failure on the right: its agreement to the now-bipartisan rule of pas d’ennemis à gauche, pas d’amis à droit. David French is quite willing to endorse intersectionality in the pages of Vox; but Donald Trump is too far. (As Liel Liebovitz pointed out, David French endorsed the Russiagate conspiracy theory.)

This rule, in fact, is part of what ‘Frenchist’ niceness means in practice. Civility and decency are all well and good in the abstract, but who defines them? To what extent can ‘Frenchists’ extricate themselves from the influence of those who insist that the leftist platform is a simple matter of civility and decency? Furthermore, why should the civility among lawyers that French advocates generalize outside the professional realm? What percentage of truly political victories, rather than the legal-procedural ones that French concerns himself with, were won by politeness alone? Our goal must not be to remain unfailingly polite as our losses pile up; it must be to win. Ahmari is right about this: decency is a tactic, and becoming attached to a tactic is a mistake. This doesn’t mean we ought to follow the left in, say, launching coordinated attacks on random children; what it means is that, at least in David Hines’s account of leftist tactics, perhaps those attacks wouldn’t have happened if the journalists had gotten a little more operant conditioning

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Ahmari’s position, however, is equally untenable. Using the state to forcibly reorder the public square toward the (Christian if not specifically Catholic) “Highest Good” would require a higher level of religiosity, and, more importantly, a higher level of willingness to dispense with old American liberal principles, than can be found in America today, where only half of the population is even nominally Catholic or Evangelical, fewer than two fifths claim to go to church every week, and the single largest religious group is ‘none’. The integralist Adrian Vermeule has argued that the election of Trump demonstrates that the American political landscape can change on a dime; but that doesn’t imply it’s likely to change in that direction. It’s true that the Fifth Great Awakening, or the sixth or seventh ones, could produce mass conversions to Catholicism and usher in an integralist America, but it’s equally true that it could produce the revival of the cult of Tengri and the remythologization of the United States as the greatest steppe empire since the Yamnaya expansion. Get ahead of the curve — buy your cowboy hats now!

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But what else does the election of Trump represent? Ahmari positioned his article against ‘Frenchism’ as an explication of a manifesto of sorts that he signed after the 2016 election, which he and others took as a sign of the death of the pre-Trump conservative consensus; but this manifesto is less a comprehensive rethinking of American conservatism than a denunciation of free-market ‘fusionism’ by a religious, socially conservative faction of that consensus, which already had inclinations toward economic populism before Trump. Furthermore, Ahmari’s objection to ‘Frenchism’ is entirely concerned with the socon cause — remember what prompted his article!

How can this be said to be the message sent by the election of Donald Trump — who, as French points out, hangs a Playboy cover on the wall of his office? If anything, the case is stronger for the opposite: for a reading of Trump’s election as signifying the complete collapse of the pre-Trump conservative consensus, the bankruptcy of both right-neoliberal Reaganomics and the ‘political Christianity’ of the Moral Majority, and the prospect (albeit a mostly unrealized one) of conservative reorientation toward worker-friendly economic pragmatism combined with social moderation, rejection of the ludicrous and corrosive bipartisan consensus on immigration, and insistence that America was not fundamentally illegitimate before 1968.

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Establishment conservatism, it seems, is doubling down on its refusal to reckon with the realities of the American political landscape. It’s true that the ascendant left wants to revoke religious liberty, with the goal of subordinating Christianity (specifically Christianity) to the whims of the woke state; but this is only one facet of its platform. It also promotes a view of white Americans reminiscent of the ethnic hatred stoked against market-dominant minorities in certain countries in the 20th century (never mind that white Americans aren’t even the richest demographic!); claims that our country is fundamentally illegitimate; calls for the destruction of our borders; pushes for a credentialist economy in which no one can succeed without first obtaining permission from a committee of progressive priests, who will dispense it based more on loyalty to the cause than on any apolitical notion of merit; advocates for the abolition of the nation-state in favor of a tightly controlled and managed ‘inclusive society’ in which the inevitable ethnic conflict will provide the ruling structure with a bottomless well of opportunities to justify its own expansion; and seeks to subordinate everything, from colleges to corporations to open-source software organizations to knitting groups, to an arbitrary and intentionally byzantine code of conduct, in order to purge infidels from the whole of society. This is not ‘libertine,’ it is totalitarian. And the totality of that agenda must be opposed.

The conservative debate thus far has been premised on the idea that the proper response to Trump, the proper way forward, is to simply revitalize the platform of the Moral Majority. Not only does this fail to address many of the problems facing our country today ⁠— it has little, if anything, to say about immigration, which is necessarily the most pressing issue because its effects are permanent and irreversible — it offers little potential for attaining true hegemony. The conflict between moralists and libertines in America predates the United States itself and is unlikely to result in a decisive victory anytime soon (in other words, it’s Lindy), and it’s sufficiently orthogonal to the main dimension of American politics that there are strains of progressivism that have evolved to accommodate both. Many progressives even oppose drag!

But simply banning drag queens from California’s libraries won’t make America great again. The question of what will remains open, but here are some components of a new conservatism that will be necessary: an end to mass unskilled migration, stricter immigration controls, and an uncompromising defense of borders and the nation-state system; the establishment of policies and culture that support marriage, family formation, and homeownership; a serious drive to retake cultural hegemony from the progressives; a willingness to combat the conspiratorial demographic hatred which casts men as sub-rational pigs and whites as the nefarious, scheming villains of history; and the abandonment of the dead consensus of social conservatism and little else, in favor of a new nationalism that protects both Christian and ‘pagan’ Americans and works to preserve the civilization they have built.

#jacobite magazine #james giuran #david french #sohrab ahmari

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